I love the Olympics. What’s not to love? The best of the best, clawing their way to a chance to compete for one of three dinky medals. It’s like winning an Oscar, except that real, measurable talent is involved.
- I don’t have broadcast TV, so I stream what I want to watch. When you see a live event without jumbotrons, nattering experts, heart-wrenching music cues, instant recaps, instant strocaps, instant repcaps, and instant slocaps, the event is really quite fascinating. Unbroken and pure.
- nbcolympics.com is one of the worst answers to a pretty ambitious problem: presenting live and subsequently processed programming in a way that is easy to find and sort through. They fail miserably when it comes to finding and sorting. Disgusting and repetitive advertisements, a labyrinthine navigation scheme, disjointed groupings. What a mess. Here it is — 2008 — and we still can’t slice and dice content the way any old sci-fi writer from the 60s could have.
- The sooper-dooper enhanced streaming video is vibrant and fluid, but it just can’t reproduce a water polo match, or calm the noise from splashes that swimmers produce when stroking their hearts out toward a record finish. It does baseball games well because so much in baseball involves time standing still.
- Sports experts are like whipped cream. Do we really need the extra calories? Isn’t that Michael Phelps Triple Sundae exquisite without pouring half a can of fluffy stuff on top of it? Gag me.
- OK, that weightlifter who snapped his arm in half trying to lift is way super hot. I hope he recovers quickly and brings many superstrong little hotties into the world.
- I’ve already talked about how much I love the rowing. I’m also enjoying women’s weightlifting (what a spunky gaggle of girls who could beat me up) and diving (no better physiques in the world).
- Most boring events so far? As in deargodjustgivethesepeopleamedal? Judo, men’s lightweight weightlifting, softball, and water polo (mostly because you can’t see more than a bunch of blue & white blurs when streaming).
- Must give superior props to the badminton combatants, who actually make striking the killing blow to a birdie look incredibly sexy.